MS Windows: How To Free Up Hard Disk Space for 2012

Blown your resolutions. It’s not too late to start to better maintain your Windows PC — our How To specialist Brian Burgess shows you how to free up space with a built-in utility in Windows. Easy.

January is a a good time to resolve to be more on top of your system’s health and well-being. A good start is to clear out old and unused files — that will gain you back some storage space on your hard disk. Here’s how.

The Local Disk Properties window displays. Here you can see the amount of used and free space on your drive.

Click Disk Cleanup.

Windows will analyze your drive for old, duplicate and temp files that you can safely delete.

When the scan is complete, you’re shown a list of files the system thinks are deletable — and how much drive space you’ll free up if you do get rid of them. I run a disk cleanup weekly, so there isn’t a lot of space to be gained.

If you haven’t run it in a while, you’ll be surprised how much space you will get back by getting rid of that old stuff.